a blog by Enya

Seminar Saturdays – #BEDS Day 26

This is not a new segment. When I came up with the title, I realized that it sounds as if I have seminars every Saturday – I don’t, thank goodness. I need my weekend to read and prep for the school part of the week.

The only reason why it’s titled so is because I had a lot of things scheduled for today but ended up having just the one event – the Cross-Linguistic Semantics and the Exploration of Conceptual Worlds in Multilingual Contexts Seminar with Prof. Jeena Rani Marquez-Manaois. Prof. Jeena is a summa cum laude graduate of the University of the Philippines – Diliman. She is also an awardee of the prestigious Palanca award with her essay entitled ‘The River of Gold’ in 2011 and has undergone training in London, Norwich, and Manchester. At present, she teaches semantics at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, UP Diliman and recommends reading the works of C.S. Lewis – I asked after the seminar and may or may not have creep-ed her out. (credentialstaken from her blog, 2013)

I actually recorded most of the seminar – except for the brief Q&A and a bit of the introduction to the second part that focused on literature. In consequence, I am in the process of uploading two instead of one track to my Dropbox that covered a good 97% of the concepts and ideas Prof. Jeena discussed. I’ll try to squeeze in the transcription of the whole thing in my ‘Enya needs to finish this ASAP’ list while I’m having a sporadic holiday with the city festivities conveniently robbing me of schooldays.

For now, the only thing I can give you is a general idea of what happened during the seminar which may or may not involve a lot of awkward gassy breathing and learning. Obviously, I refer to myself in the former description.

I learned an awful lot in the seminar about the challenges and the wonders of semantics. A rekindled appreciation for my own language inspired me to reread every single text that I have on hand that’s written in Filipino – and I still have my textbooks from high school that has the slightly abridged stories of Florante at Laura,El Filibusterismo, Ibong Adarna and Noli me Tangere. Also there’s the Heights collection from Ada in which some of the literary works by Ateneo de Manila University students are written in Filipino. And maybe in time, I’ll be writing some of my essays in Filipino or Cebuano for a change.

Point here is that a lot of the English majors enjoyed the seminar immensely – me most especially since I can’t speak for all. I learned a lot, and got inspired a lot which makes me hope that one day, maybe I can do that, too.

Off to appreciate oddly old but new things,

Enya

P.S.

All those photos I took with my phone and none of the speaker. Gonna have to refer to Facebook for those tomorrow.